yujiri.xyz

Game design

Secrets ruin games

written 2026-10-27

Most games I've played in the last few years (mostly metroidvanias and linearvanias) have a bad philosophy on "secrets". They're filled with invisible objects and paths and fake or breakable walls that look completely normal.

The problem with such "secrets" is that once you know a game has these, you're encouraged to slash every wall looking for them, which is tedious.

Secrets can be designed better. Players should be able to find them by being observant and clever, not trial and error. For a good example, look at the "developer room" in CrossCode.

This room is unreachable on a first playthru. Halfway through the game, you run through a room with a puzzle involving objects you haven't seen yet and which only interact with abilities you don't have yet. An NPC tells you to ignore this puzzle and rush past, for story reasons. But if you replay the game, you'll recognize these objects, and know that the puzzle could be solved if you had late-game abilities. One of the optional new game+ modifiers lets you start with these abilities. If you get there on such a new game+, you can solve it and it leads to the developer room.

This is a good secret because the way to find it isn't to tediously inspect every tile in every room, it's to notice something onscreen and recognize it, and then to realize, having seen the new game+ menu, how it would be possible to enter. Finding this secret is a logical puzzle that can be solved by an observant player, even though a first-time player probably won't think there's anything to find.

Rusted Moss has some other good examples, as a rare metroidvania with no invisible secrets. It has a room with a roof at the top of the screen, and it's not obvious how to get on top. Players might assume you can't. But you can get on top by using the game's flexible movement abilities cleverly, and this moves the screen up to reveal a chest.

Hollow Knight is a more classic metroidvania, whose secrets are mostly breakable walls. But at least in this game there's *usually* a subtle visual clue, like a wall looking slightly cracked. These secrets don't reward cleverness, but they are at least findable through observance rather than slashing every wall just incase.

Sadly, most metroidvania designers are not learning from these good examples, and are just stuffing their games with unsatisfying secrets that encourage tedium.